Imagining the Past

Strangely, the lens of history can at one and the same time serve both to clarify and to blur our understanding of the past.

The clarifying part is easy enough to understand. Historians have the task of piecing together the events of the past. For incidents small and large, individuals of great and modest distinction, we count on the work and wisdom of historians to understand that which preceded us. And we know that new histories must be written all the time, even on topics we believe to have been exhausted. Over the holiday I dipped into a new account of a well-worn subject – FDR and the Jews – and at my bedside sit three books on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Maybe there is new information that has come to light, old information that must be understood in new ways, and interpretations that compel us to reconstruct the past in an alternative manner. A historian, simply put, has professionalized the act of hindsight. It is the historian’s job to figure out “what happened,” and to provide an account, an understanding and a clarification of what went before.

Yet, despite being entrusted with the task of providing hindsight, historians can also blur our understanding of the past. Why? Because regardless of their erudition, resourcefulness and resolve, there is one thing that historians will never, ever have – the viewpoint of the individuals under scrutiny. Any retrospective, by definition, lacks the perspective of the subjects being studied. Moreover, a historian – or any Monday morning quarterback for that matter – can never claim true objectivity in reconstructing the past, because he or she knows the one thing that the players on the field don’t – how the game will turn out. As the great historian of our people Jacob Katz once explained in describing the sequence of events leading to the advent of the Third Reich, “It is [epistemologically] erroneous to assume that contemporaries could – not to say, should – have had the same knowledge that historians have at the their disposal.” “That knowledge,” writes my teacher Paul Mendes-Flohr, “is ex post facto by definition.” (German Jews, 92). You, I, anyone may attempt to reconstruct the past, but unless you are living in exactly the same circumstances as the person whom you are recalling, which of course none of us are, we must concede that our reconstructions are necessarily limited and thus our efforts must be infused by an abiding sense of modesty. To paraphrase Katz: “… moral judgments can only be pronounced on individuals when we have fully imagined the situation they were in.” (Commentary, May 1975) None of us can dare say how we would or would not have acted in similar context, unless we ourselves can fully imagine and, as it were, recreate the very context under discussion.

Which strikes me, on this final day of Passover, as the very thing this festival has been telling us all along. Throughout the year, every single day, twice a day to be exact, we are obligated to remember the Exodus from Egypt. In order to fulfill the commandment of zekhirah, the mitzvah of remembering the Exodus, we actually don’t need Passover. We do it every time we recite the sh’ma. But as Maimonides and the sages make clear, the mitzvah of Passover is not merely one of recollection; it is a second, different mitzvah, particular to this festival. As the Haggadah states, “Every person is obligated to see him or herself as if he or she had personally left Egypt.” So much ink has been spilt on whether this is a holiday of history or memory, the retelling of an actual event or the recollection of a collective myth. I think the task on the table is different, more interesting and more along the lines of the predicament of the historians with which I began. Passover implores us to cross the temporal and cognitive divide between the present and the past. “The past must be imagined,” according the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, “as if it were still the present …” (Quoted in German Jews, 92) We must see ourselves as if we  personally had lived through the history that we otherwise merely recall as an ongoing remembrance. We shuttle back and forth, with the immediacy of this festival serving as a counterbalance to the substratum of our year round identity.

All of which, I would contend, is exactly what this moment of Yizkor is about. We may recite Yizkor four times a year, but no other Yizkor feels as natural, with the muscle group of memory already made supple by the preceding festival days. We are well aware of the empty seats at our seder tables, the places of our family and friends, whose memories we carry with us year round. For some, those remembrances are rosy, adoring and unblemished. For others here, I know, this can be a time of reckoning, perhaps even with a prosecutorial air where individuals are reduced to courtroom categories of guilty or not guilty. When the floodgates of memory open, it is not always within our control what aspect of our loved one we recall.

But no matter how you arrive at this moment of Yizkor, this morning I ask you to do what you did at the seder table, which we can only be asked to do for a short interval of time. Try, hard as it may be, to let the expanse of time collapse on itself and to put yourself into the shoes of your loved one. What were their hopes, what were their struggles and what were their dreams? If you could, just for a moment, see this world as they saw this world, imagine their lives from their vantage point, how would that world look? We can all agree on one thing: those we remember today were human, with strengths and with weaknesses – like each of us – imperfect. Some of those imperfections may have been theirs to control, and some, inevitably, were beyond their choosing. Throughout the year, throughout our lives, we are conditioned, perhaps rightly so, to see the world through the prism of our own understanding. This morning, try something different. Allow for the modest possibility that you, I, all of us, only ever have one side of the story – our side. At Yizkor we are asked to dig deep. As with the Exodus at the Seder table, our communion with the past lasts but a moment; what we carry year round is the memory of our loved one. But how much richer, deeper, textured and forgiving that memory can be when we have had the courage to engage with it, to see it from a perspective not our own and to concede the fact that our loved ones – no different from each one of us – contended with a context that was, at the end of the day, theirs and only theirs to fully understand.

In a retrospective on Roosevelt written shortly after his death, Felix Frankfurter reflected, “… it has been wisely said that if the judgment of the time must be corrected by that of posterity, it is not less true that the judgment of posterity must be corrected by that of the time.” (Breitman & Lichtman: FDR & The Jews, 329) Here and now – at this moment of Yizkor, on this festival of Passover – we ask that the judgment of “the time” be given its due deference, or at the very least be allowed to sit side-by-side next to the judgment of posterity, all towards the hope that a clearer view of our loved ones will snap into focus. Of course, we pray that one day our loved ones will extend that same act of courtesy towards us in all our imperfections. But here and now, we know it is incumbent on each one of us to extend that courageous gesture to those whom we recall with love and affection today.